Mobile devices and the political system have had a surprisingly long history, from waist-band mounted pagers being an essential accessory of MPs during the Blair years to mobile phone voting being trialled successfully in Sheffield in 2002 for local elections.
Mobile devices and the political system have had a surprisingly long history, from waist-band mounted pagers being an essential accessory of MPs during the Blair years to mobile phone voting being trialled successfully in Sheffield in 2002 for local elections. This was considered by former chairman of O2 David Varney “to work best in poorer areas, where there is a high percentage of pay-as-you-go mobile phone users. It also seems to work best among young people”.
The Finnish parliament had pioneered providing mobile email to MPs through national champion Nokia in order to keep constituents and their parliamentary representatives better connected. More recently in the UK iPhones were popularised in Westminster by early adopter David Davis (at the time, the shadow home secretary), alongside the dominant Blackberry device.
In 2010, mobile devices have become ubiquitous so efforts to improve the visibility and transparency of politics using mobile technology has got to be a progressive move. MyMP by Public Zone and the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (NESTA) is an interesting way of moving this concept forward in 2010.
The service had been piloted by Derek Wyatt just prior to the election and has since been rolled out to a wider tranche of MPs. The idea is that the MyMP application makes the MP’s activity and location (for surgeries etc) immediately accessible and brings a greater degree of transparency to political representation.
A particularly interesting feature is the ability to poll the opinions of those constituents who have downloaded the application. The application will continue to be free for constituents to download and charge MPs a small service charge to fund ongoing costs and maintenance.
The application is an admirable move towards a more transparent and hopefully inclusive democratic process. In order to move it further along in a progressive direction Left Foot Forward has some suggestions:
• Move beyond the iPhone – Whilst one in seven of the UK population owning a smartphone and the iPhone being just a fraction of that figure, a more device-agnostic approach would allow for even greater inclusion. In addition, government ministers are only allowed Blackberry devices at the moment as iPhones haven’t been approved by government IT boffins;
• Make it compulsory rather than an opt-in process for MPs – MPs who aren’t interested in being truly representative of their constituents currently don’t have to use the MyMP service if they don’t want to; and
• Make it a game – Location-based service Foursquare has managed to build up a database of venues around the world by using consumer-submitted check-ins. This service was driven by ‘game play’ where participants could earn points, see how they compared to peers and earn badges. How could this process be used to improve the frequency and quality of MP data? Could the ‘game’ create a league table of MP transparency?
Find out if your MP has their own application at MyMP
42 Responses to “MyMP iPhone edition”
michel fournier
MyMP iPhone edition | Left Foot Forward http://ht.ly/17ZPAC
Tom Harle
Thanks Ged for writing about the new MyMP, I’m part of the team that has been working on the app at Public Zone.
It’s really great people are picking this up and helping us get the word out, and offing suggestions for future development, I hope people can keep adding them.
I’d love to pick up on a few of the suggestions raised so far as we’re actually already well into discussions with people about other platforms. There are a few things to iron out; there are differences in the functional capabilities between the phones and the way that they’re built, but I’m hopeful we’ll be up and running soonish.
I’m not sure about the compulsory bit though, not really because of the concerns Mark Pack makes (the content control is web-based), mainly because we want the app to work for constituents. You just have to look at the quality of the mixed bag of MPs websites, over 10 years after mass-adoption of that medium. We do actually have capability to bring in content to the app from their sites, but the MPs we’re working with now are all populating their content manually, it seems better for useability that way. But we wouldn’t want to force MPs to set up apps only for them never to use them as a means of engaging with constituents.
Just on the capablities of the app as it is, it doesn’t actually do MP tracking, it offers them the ability to add news, surgeries and diary fixtures with references to a constituency map, so that people can match MP’s activity to their local area. It’s a nice difference between mobile and standard internet, mapping is a far more accessible way to access content on a mobile device, so we’re playing up to that.
We actually dropped the voting feature for this version, partly because of what Morus pointed out, and also because of the intricacies of the whip system. Instead we developed the discussions feature to give MPs the chance to lay out issues and canvass constituency opinion.
Please keep reviewing it and constructively criticising, we’ll be refining the app to make it as effective as possible and it would be great to have your input – we have a twitter set up at @mympapp and there’s more information at http://www.my-mp.org.uk
Jason Moss
MyMP iPhone edition | Left Foot Forward: Mobile devices and the political system have had a surprisingly long hist… http://bit.ly/cMXdUG
Kimmy
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Technology
MyMP iPhone edition | Left Foot Forward http://bit.ly/9BnYSC